Blog post written by Alexandru Salceanu
This exhibition is currently on view at ARTogether Center until May 20th, 2026
Identity, Memory, and the Meaning of Home
At ARTogether, the current exhibition Where Are You From? begins with a question that many immigrants and children of immigrants know intimately. On the surface, it appears simple, even casual, often asked in conversation as a gesture of curiosity.
Yet in today’s political climate, the question carries far greater weight. It can become a quiet test of legitimacy, belonging, and who is allowed to claim space. For many, it is not simply a question about geography, but one loaded with assumptions about identity, citizenship, race, and permanence.
Presented by the Romanian Art Collective SF, this exhibition invites viewers to reconsider that question and the histories it carries. Rather than offering a direct answer, Where Are You From? opens a space for reflection, complexity, and contradiction. It asks us to think beyond borders and national categories and to consider how identity is formed through memory, migration, language, and lived experience.
The exhibition first debuted at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York last fall and now continues in Oakland at ARTogether, a space whose mission makes it an especially meaningful home for this project.
ARTogether has long provided a safe and welcoming environment where immigrants and refugees can create, connect, and share their stories through art. In that context, the exhibition feels less like a presentation and more like a conversation already in progress.
A Collective Reflection
This iteration brings together the work of visual artists Dan Perjovschi, Taraneh Hemami, Charlene Tan, Claudia Huenchuleo Paquien, Alexandra Cicorschi, Bogdan Pastor, Camelia Skikos, Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian, Inas Al-soqi, Ioanida Costache, and Alexandru Salceanu, alongside performances by Florentina Mocanu and Colin Farish. Each approaches the theme from distinct cultural, political, and personal perspectives, resisting the idea that identity can be neatly categorized or reduced to origin alone.
Some pieces confront displacement directly, addressing exile, inherited trauma, and the lasting emotional impact of migration. Others focus on resilience, examining how memory and cultural practice survive despite distance, assimilation, or erasure. Through installation, text, portraiture, archival material, and gesture, the artists explore how identity is carried in the body and in everyday rituals, often in ways that cannot be easily translated.
What makes the exhibition compelling is that it does not attempt to resolve these tensions. Instead, it allows contradiction to remain visible. Home can be both a physical place and a feeling that no longer exists. Visibility can offer recognition, but it can also invite surveillance. The works acknowledge that identity is not fixed but constantly changing.
This multiplicity reflects the lived reality of many immigrant communities. Identity is often formed in relation to absence as much as presence, to the language lost, the traditions remembered imperfectly, and the places imagined through family stories rather than direct experience. For second-generation immigrants especially, home can feel inherited rather than possessed, something both deeply familiar and slightly out of reach.
Why It Matters Now
The title Where Are You From? draws its power from its familiarity. Nearly everyone has asked or been asked this question, yet its meaning shifts depending on who is speaking and who is being addressed. For some, it is harmless. For others, it becomes a reminder that they are seen as perpetual outsiders, no matter how long they have lived somewhere or how strongly they belong.
In contemporary political discourse, immigration is too often framed through fear, suspicion, and exclusion. Questions of borders and citizenship dominate headlines, while the human realities behind migration are flattened into policy debates. This exhibition pushes back against that logic.
By centering artists whose work emerges from lived experience, Where Are You From? restores emotional and historical depth to a conversation often reduced to statistics. It reminds us that migration is not an exception but a fundamental part of human history.
For those who have lived with this question their entire lives, seeing those experiences reflected in art can be deeply validating. For others, it creates an opportunity to listen more carefully.
In the end, Where Are You From? is not asking for a location. It is asking how we define home, how we carry memory, and how we make room and accept one another.
This exhibition is on display until May 20th at ARTogether Center. To make an appointment to visit, email roartcollective@gmail.com
About the Author
Alexandru Salceanu is a Romanian-American interdisciplinary artist whose work navigates the intersections of memory, identity, and cultural belonging. His practice reflects the continual process of reconciling his cultural heritage with his assimilation into American life.
Alexandru Salceanu’s work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at the de Young Museum, Root Division, Kala Art Institute, Mills College Art Museum, SOMArts Cultural Center, University of San Francisco, University of San Diego, and Art Academy of San Diego, among others. Internationally, his work has been shown in Italy, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Romania, Philippines, and South Korea.
He has received numerous awards, including the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Artist Grant, California Humanities Connecting California Grant, CCI Quick Grant, The Puffin Foundation Grant, and the Cadogan Scholarship. Salceanu earned his B.A. from the University of San Diego and his MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California.